Daniel Oberti (1945–2009) was an American artist, sculptor, teacher, lecturer, mentor and creative community activist.
Born in San Francisco, California, Oberti lived and worked there until 1978, when he moved to Sonoma County in order to devote his life to art and ceramics. [1]
Oberti’s best-known local sculpture, titled Guardian of the Creek, popularly known as The Fish, is located at Gateway Park, near the entrance to the Prince Memorial Greenway on Santa Rosa Avenue. The Fish is a 13-foot-tall, mosaic-covered statue of a rainbow trout was designed by Mario Uribe and created by Oberti and students in Santa Rosa’s Artstart program for artists in training.
During his long career at Artstart, Oberti also created two prominently placed concrete-and-brass sculptures: Three Spheres, at the Hyatt Vineyard Creek Hotel on the Prince Memorial Greenway, and Shadow Catcher, Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa.
One of Oberti's largest projects titled Star Dancers was a collaboration with astronomer Maria Sundin of Gothenburg, Sweden. [2] [3] In this project Oberti created works based on Sundin's discoveries of the intricate and fascinating orbits of certain stars in barred galaxies. Oberti sketched newly discovered star patterns in clay, which served as a canvas to interpret Sundin's simulations in an artistic and sculptural format. The work presented cutting edge discoveries of star paths within the scope of a most ancient art form - that of potterymaking and sculpture. According to Sundin, "The Star Dancers project is a provocative enhancement of our collaboration... For [me], this [was] an entirely new way to reach a wider audience with [my] new research results. For Oberti, [it was] an expansive and creative explosion of new works which pay homage to astronomical themes from the archaic to the contemporary." [2]
Oberti's outdoor artworks can be seen throughout the Bay Area in Healdsburg, Penngrove, Rohnert Park and Mendocino. Oberti’s international work includes the Venus sphere created for the world’s largest scale model of the solar system, in Stockholm, Sweden, [4] and sculptures in Onsala, Sweden and Palermo, Italy.
Oberti died peacefully at the age of 64 from cancer on May 2, 2009 at his home in Sebastopol.
"The sphere is the most perfect, the most capricious of figures, wherein neither beginning nor end can be found." - Copernicus.
An armillary sphere is a model of objects in the sky, consisting of a spherical framework of rings, centered on Earth or the Sun, that represent lines of celestial longitude and latitude and other astronomically important features, such as the ecliptic. As such, it differs from a celestial globe, which is a smooth sphere whose principal purpose is to map the constellations. It was invented separately, in ancient China possibly as early as the 4th century BC and ancient Greece during the 3rd century BC, with later uses in the Islamic world and Medieval Europe.
Santa Maria Novella is a church in Florence, Italy, situated opposite, and lending its name to, the city's main railway station. Chronologically, it is the first great basilica in Florence, and is the city's principal Dominican church.
The American Discovery Trail is a system of recreational trails and roads that collectively form a coast-to-coast hiking and biking trail across the mid-tier of the United States. Horses can also be ridden on most of this trail. The coastal trailheads are the Delmarva Peninsula on the Atlantic Ocean and the northern California coast on the Pacific Ocean. The trail has northern and southern alternates for part of its distance, passing through Chicago and St. Louis respectively. The total length of the trail, including both the north and south routes, is 6,800 miles (10,900 km). The northern route covers 4,834 miles (7,780 km) with the southern route covering 5,057 miles (8,138 km). It is the only non-motorized coast-to-coast trail.
Michael Kelley was an American artist whose work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance, photography, sound and video. He also worked on curatorial projects; collaborated with many other artists and musicians; and left a formidable body of critical and creative writing. He often worked collaboratively and had produced projects with artists Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and John Miller. Writing in The New York Times, in 2012, Holland Cotter described the artist as "one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion."
The Sphere is a monumental cast bronze sculpture by German artist Fritz Koenig (1924–2017).
Kiki Smith is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.
The Sweden Solar System is the world's largest permanent scale model of the Solar System. The Sun is represented by the Avicii Arena in Stockholm, the second-largest hemispherical building in the world. The inner planets can also be found in Stockholm but the outer planets are situated northward in other cities along the Baltic Sea. The system was started by Nils Brenning, professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and Gösta Gahm, professor at the Stockholm University. The model represents the Solar System on the scale of 1:20 000 000, i.e. one metre represents 20,000 km.
The Florida Trail is one of eleven National Scenic Trails in the United States, created by the National Trails System Act of 1968. It runs 1,500 miles (2,400 km), from Big Cypress National Preserve to Fort Pickens at Gulf Islands National Seashore, Pensacola Beach. Also known as the Florida National Scenic Trail, the trail provides permanent non-motorized recreation for hiking and other compatible activities within an hour's drive of most Floridians.
Ned Kahn is an environmental artist and sculptor, known in particular for museum exhibits, one of which is the Exploratorium in San Francisco. His work usually intends to make an invisible aspect of nature, visible.
Nancy Holt was an American artist most known for her public sculpture, installation art, concrete poetry, and land art. Throughout her career, Holt also produced works in other media, including film and photography. Since 2018, her legacy has been cared for by Holt/Smithson Foundation.
Santa Rosa Creek is a 22-mile-long (35 km) stream in Sonoma County, California, which rises on Hood Mountain and discharges to the Laguna de Santa Rosa by way of the Santa Rosa Flood Control Channel. This article covers both the creek and the channel.
Lauren Elder is an American artist, designer, and environmental activist known for environmental works and performative collaborations.
Space art, also known as astronomical art, is a genre of art that visually depicts the universe through various artistic styles. It may also refer to artworks sent into space.
Systemic is a research project designed to search data for extrasolar planets using amateur astronomers. The project utilizes a downloaded console provided on the Systemic website, allowing users to sort through data sets in search of characteristics which may reveal the presence of a planet within a planetary system.
Eugene Daub is an American contemporary figure sculptor, best known for his portraits and figurative monument sculpture created in the classic heroic style. His sculptures reside in three of the nation's state capitals and in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. His work appears in public monuments and permanent collections in the United States and Europe.
Daniel Arsham is an American visual artist. He lives and works in New York City.
Charles Ross is an American contemporary artist known for work centered on natural light, time and planetary motion. His practice spans several art modalities and includes large-scale prism and solar spectrum installations, "solar burns" created by focusing sunlight through lenses, paintings made with dynamite and powdered pigment, and Star Axis, an earthwork built to observe the stars. Ross emerged in the mid-1960s at the advent of minimalism, and is considered a forerunner of "prism art"—a sub-tradition within that movement—as well as one of the major figures of land art. His work employs geometry, seriality, refined forms and surfaces, and scientific concepts in order to reveal optical, astronomical and perceptual phenomena. Artforum critic Dan Beachy-Quick wrote that "math as a manifestation of fundamental cosmic laws—elegance, order, beauty—is a principle undergirding Ross’s work … [he] becomes a maker-medium of a kind, constructing various methods for sun and star to create the art itself."
Little Sugar Creek Greenway is a linear park and stream restoration project in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. When completed it will consist of twenty miles of trails and paved walkways running from Cordelia Park just north of uptown Charlotte, then south through midtown Charlotte, and continuing all the way to the South Carolina state line. The Little Sugar Creek Greenway is a key part of the Cross Charlotte Trail (XCLT) and a segment in the Carolina Thread Trail, a regionwide network of trails that pass through 15 counties.
The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) initiative is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) virtual institute designed to foster interdisciplinary collaboration in the search for life on exoplanets. Led by the Ames Research Center, the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NExSS will help organize the search for life on exoplanets from participating research teams and acquire new knowledge about exoplanets and extrasolar planetary systems.
51 Eridani b is a "Jupiter-like" planet that orbits the young F0 V star 51 Eridani, in the constellation Eridanus. It is 96 light years away from the solar system, and it is approximately 20 million years old.